Back in 2008, when President Obama was running for his first term, he promised to be a post-partisan leader. While a Democrat, he said he would accept good ideas when they came from Republicans. At the time, I believed him, at least to some degree. And I wrote about it in this NY Times column.

Sadly, I was wrong. The short version of the story is this: As a candidate, President Obama campaigned on a platform of raising taxes on the rich. Yet he and his economic advisers also said they wanted to raise dividend taxes only slightly, from 15 to 20 percent. For reasons I explained in the Times article, keeping dividend taxes low was a position bolstered by good economics. Now, however, the president wants to raise dividend taxes to ordinary income tax rates (plus, for high-income taxpayers, the new tax of 3.8 percent that is part of the Obamacare legislation).

To be it another way, he campaigned as a moderate, willing to concede that the other party had some good ideas on tax policy. Once in office, he gave up on those ideas.

A similar thing happened with Bowles-Simpson. During his first term, he appointed a bipartisan panel, which concluded we could address our long-term fiscal problem with lower tax rates and a broader tax base. Now, the President goes around the country lambasting that approach.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether President Obama is a good or bad president. But the claim that he has tried to transcend partisanship and find a middle ground is just impossible to square with the facts.

Obama is an agitator, firebrand, fomenter, demagogue – which ever word your prefer (asshole). He cloaks his resentment of traditional Americans in lies and a low voice, it makes him seem less malevolent. He fooled many people, but Mankiw doesn’t have an excuse for being stupid.

O’bammy had a long unimpressive record prior to being elected the first time and now the dumbed down public re-elected him based mostly on instant gratification with free stuff.

Incompetence, lying, obfuscation should alone have done him in but noooooooooo… He slithered in anyway.

Yep, the anointed one who is a textbook product of the liberal academia will cause us plenty of misery for another four years IF we are lucky. If not so lucky, a “new world order” may take place where we have little or nothing to say about it..

These too late mea culpas make me want to puke. They remind me of Robert Strange McNamara coming out in 1995 and admitting he was “wrong, terribly wrong” about the Vietnam war. Try telling that that to the widows and orphans of the 58,148 American soldiers who died in that war.

I didn’t go to one of those fancy-schmantzy ivy-covered colleges like Hahvahd. I went to schools covered with weeds and pigeon droppings. I can barely do math let alone economics. But I figured out that Obama was a phony-baloney piece of shit SCofaMF before he got elected the first time.

Ironically the new taxes will have relatively little effect on the detested Romney uber-class, who derive most of their income from capital gains, taxed at a much lower rate. They also have access to all manner of offshore dodges. Nor will it have much impact on Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires, or the Hollywood moguls and urban land speculators who constitute the Democratic Party’s “good rich,” and enjoy many of the same privileges as their wealthy conservative counterparts.

The people whose wallets will be drained in the new war on “the rich” are high-earning, but hardly plutocratic professionals like engineers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners and the like. Once seen as the bastion of the middle class, and exemplars of upward mobility, these people are emerging as the modern day “kulaks,” the affluent peasants ruthlessly targeted by Stalin in the early 1930s.

Back in 2008, right at the peak of the McCain/Palin, Obama/Biden presidential election, I wrote a scathing opinion to the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman about Sarah Palin (titled “Caribou Barbie”), and five years later, I would like to recant my opinion and tell the people of the Mat-Su Valley just how wrong I was at the time.

The Frontiersman published the opinion and it drew a lot of comments, mostly negative, and here we are almost five years later, and I want to pass on what I have learned.

As for Obama, he is opportunistic. The problems are comprehensive, and while he was a direct contributor before coming to office, his infamy is earned with exacerbating the dysfunction to advance his own political, economic, and social standing.

Now, now, Professor. This is the time to be gracious. To accept that human beings are imperfect. That some are more imperfect than others. This isn’t the first time that people have ignored the cumulative wisdom deduced from historical evidence, rejected traditional knowledge for the sake of ego, and it will certainly not be the last. Rebellion with cause and without a clue is typical of an immature being. To be fair, while fundamental (or progressive) corruption is the overwhelming concern, we cannot discount exceptional corruption, and that our trust may at times be misplaced or exploited.

If someone makes a monumental error in judgement that harms only them because there wasn’t enough evidence against that action available to them, I can show pity.

When someone makes a monumental error in judgement in the face of overwhelming evidence because it makes them feeeel good about themselves, I have nothing but contempt. When they subject the rest of us to the results of their black-hole-stupidity, contempt turns to rage.

Pffft. Maybe I hang around the wrong type of Democrat, but I can’t think of a single one who will care what Mankow wrote. I could list the same reversals Mankow did and they’d just stare right through me. Or they’d smile, with a gleam in their eye, and admit “at least he’s our son-of-a-bitch.

Obama got elected largely by people for whom these sorts of things don’t matter at all. He’s either a: black, or b: Democrat, and the rest is too confusing our troublesome to understand. Mankow is just trying to look learned among his peers.

the economic writing on the wall has been there since 1992. America has had a meltdown every 10 years 89 99 2008 .Each time stimulated Seemingly out of it or got lucky. But did they really?

The accounts are piling up & if a professor of economics at the nation’sleading academic institution cannot see that – then there is l,ittle hope .

most nations swing a bit right a bit a bit left a bit centre but SOME haves recognized the situation & public discourse is on a higher level. Some nations are actually trying to balance their budgets .

All I have to say is that if he had written this “mea culpa” in 2009, it would be understandable. There was quite the hype and hope back then. But to proclaim that he is just now seeing things, in the last month after the election, that have been completely obvious to ANYONE who pays the slightest bit of attention, makes me think he is oblivious. Seriously, when I first read it, I wanted to check the dateline.

NO ONE who voted for Obama in 2012, who is now expressing regret/buyer’s remorse, has a valid excuse. NO ONE! I don’t want to hear their sob story. The evidence was staring in straight in the face.

Not just that, but Mitt Romney would have made one heck of a president. Now I genuinely fear for my beloved country.

And, clearly he is accomplished, between his work for Romney and for George W. Bush and his academic work (more on that in a minute).

But, a jury might convict Mankiw of multiple counts of “criminal stupidity” for his New Keynesianism and he shockingly naive belief (especially given his exposure to politics and Washington DC) that Barack Obama would somehow be a post-partisan president. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that Barack Obama was a radical and did not have either the standing or the leadership skills to bridge a storm gutter, let alone the chasm that is partisanship.

At least you are big enough to own up to your mistakes, Professor Mankiw. Live and learn; live and learn.

Back in 2008, when President Obama was running for his first term, he promised to be a post-partisan leader. While a Democrat, he said he would accept good ideas when they came from Republicans. At the time, I believed that anyone who said they believed him was a moron or a liar.